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Least agency

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The principle, in the OWASP agentic list, of giving an agent no more autonomy than its task needs: agentic behaviour deployed where it is not needed widens the attack surface without adding value 1. The cheapest agent control is the agent not built, such as a fixed workflow with one model call in place of a planner.

Developed in
ch. 23, Governing AI agents
Chapters
ch. 23, AI Agents
Contrast with
Autonomy level
Source
1 numbered reference, listed below

Where it is used

One chapter of the Body of Knowledge uses the term. Each link opens the first section that does.

  • 23 · AI Agents Opening 2 mentions
  • Autonomy

    In the EU AI Act and OECD texts, some degree of independence of action from human involvement, which almost every AI system has.

Sources

  1. [1] Top 10 for Agentic Applications 2026 (ASI01 Agent Goal Hijack; ASI02 Tool Misuse and Exploitation; ASI03 Identity and Privilege Abuse; ASI04 Agentic Supply Chain Vulnerabilities; ASI05 Unexpected Code Execution (RCE); ASI06 Memory & Context Poisoning; ASI07 Insecure Inter-Agent Communication; ASI08 Cascading Failures; ASI09 Human-Agent Trust Exploitation; ASI10 Rogue Agents; Least-Agency; per-tool least-privilege profiles; tool poisoning of a legitimate tool's interface under ASI02, a tool compromised at the source under ASI04). OWASP GenAI Security Project. 2025-12-09. https://genai.owasp.org/resource/owasp-top-10-for-agentic-applications-for-2026/ (verified: primary)

Definitions of legal terms paraphrase the cited text, which governs. Dated statements are as of .

Cite this term

García Aibar, J. (2026). Least agency. In AI Governance Engineering: The Thesis & Body of Knowledge (v0.5.0), Glossary. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22956197. https://aigovernanceengineer.com/glossary/least-agency. CC BY 4.0

BibTeX

@misc{aige2026leastagency,
  author  = {Jorge García Aibar},
  title   = {{Least agency}},
  note    = {Glossary, AI Governance Engineering: The Thesis \& Body of Knowledge, version 0.5.0},
  year    = {2026},
  doi     = {10.5281/zenodo.22956197},
  url     = {https://aigovernanceengineer.com/glossary/least-agency}
}